The Cost of Knowing: An Economic Evaluation of Context Acquisition in DSA Systems
Martin B. H. Weiss, Mohammed Altamimi · D-Scholarship@Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) · 2011
Much of the research in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has focused on the details of th e enabling technologies.While this has been quite useful in establishing the technical feasibility of DSA systems, it has missed an impo rtant aspect of the overall DSA problem space: in o rder fo r operators, regulato rs and users to be interested in deploying DSA based networks, the expected costs should be in proportion to what the users are realistically willing to pay for services.Consequen tly, it is important to conduct cost estimates for different DSA approaches in parallel with the technical research.In this paper, we will explore how the cost experien ced by p rima ry and secondary u sers can influence th eir incentives for participation in DSA.To do this, we co mpare the costs and cost structu res of four con text awareness approa ches from each of them.The costs we will consider a re incremental capital costs over a basic software radio using four different contex t a cquisition app roaches (sensing, databases, sensor netwo rks, and cooperative sharing).Sin ce DSA is still a relatively new research field, there is a lot of uncertainty associated with in cremental cost analyses.As a result, the cost analysis is parameterized to allow for explicit reasoning about the bounds of cost co mponents.